Subramani

Subramani (born 20 June 1943) is a Fijian author, essayist, and literary critic.

According to The Literary Encyclopedia, he is "one of Fiji's leading prose fiction writers, essayists, and critics".

His essays have dealt with multiculturalism, education, and cinema.

Subramani writes fiction and non-fiction in English and Fiji Hindi, and has combined writing with university administration.

He has served in all three universities in Fiji and has been a Dean, Pro Vice Chancellor and Acting Vice Chancellor.

He has established himself as a novelist, short story writer, essayist and a literary critic.

He has written on education, language, the university, cinema and civil society.

In his fiction, as a bilingual writer, and working from the intersection of two languages, he been able to depict, in the words of the Samoan novelist, Sia Figiel, the "struggles of Fijian society and present us with a haunting salusalu of melancholy, despair, anguish, madness, terror, loss interlaced with moments of satire and humour that encapsulates the history and experience of men and women and children caught up in the violent shadow of colonialism".

Essays of Subramani's such as "A Room to Write" and "The Children of Ramchandramanus Country", reveal that he started writing fiction when he was at high school at a time when there no Fijian writing or authors.

The obstacles he met in his writing career made him very sympathetic to aspiring writers, both young and old.

He secured a scholarship to study in New Zealand and graduated from the University of Canterbury with a degree of Bachelor of Arts in English in the year 1966.

He also received Diploma in Teaching in the year 1967.

After teaching for a couple of years, he received a Commonwealth Scholarship to study literature in Canada and gained a master's degree in English from the University of New Brunswick (Canada).

He received his Ph.

D. from the University of the South Pacific, Suva (Fiji).

Subramani taught at high school and was a senior education officer in charge of the English curriculum with the Fiji’s Ministry of Education, both for a short period.

Subramani was a Fulbright Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University, and a post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK.

He has been a visiting writer and professor to many countries, including India and Japan.

Thus, he accumulated a great deal of experience in order to follow the main goal in his life, that is, to write books.

While following his writing career, and performing the role of a public intellectual, the author served in the Governments' Advisory Council and as Chief of Media Authority in the hope of influencing policies.

This was very short-lived.

Subramani has gradually evolved as a creative writer from his childhood.

His father had come to Fiji as an indentured worker.

He was a cook cum gardener at an overseer’s bungalow from where he collected discarded books for Subramani who was still in primary school.

Subramani was a voracious reader from childhood which resulted into his dream to become a writer.

He was a leading figure in the literary renaissance that happened in the South Pacific in the 1970's when the small island states were becoming politically independent.

He worked with writers like Albert Wendt, Marjorie Crocombe, Konai Thaman, Satendra Nandan, Epeli Hau’ofa and Raymond Pillai, editing the literary journal Mana, organizing workshops for young writers, and teaching and critiquing literary works.

Along with his own writing, he continues to mentor new emerging writers.

He teaches literature and many of his students have become well-known writers.

He became the editor of the journal Mana from 1976 TO 1978, while he continued to write his own short fiction.

Subramani’s short stories were published in a number of journals and anthologies.

In 1978, Subramani's short story "Marigolds" won a South Pacific literary contest that marked the beginning of an outstanding literary career.

His short story "Marigolds" won the South Pacific Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies short story completion in 1978.

In the following year, "Gamalian's Woman" became a highly commended short story, as was "Dear Primitive" in a European short-story competition.

The first book he published was The Indo-Fijian Experience (1979) that has become a classic work.

It commemorated the centenary of Indian settlement in Fiji.

It explores the interplay of history and the fiction in depicting salient aspects of the experience of indenture, and thus for the first time Fijian historians (Ahmed Ali and Brij Lal) and creative writers (Raymond Pillai, Satendra Nandan, Subramani) are featured together to define the emerging Indo-Fijian identity.

Subramani attended All Saints Primary School and then went to Labasa secondary school where he was the Dux of the school that is why he was selected by the Ministry of Education to study at the Suva Grammar School.

It was expected that after The Indo-Fijian Experience his vision would enlarge to include the South Pacific because of his involvement with writing in the region as the editor of Mana. Thus his book South Pacific Literature; From Myth to Fabulation (1985, 1993) came into being as a foundational text to provide the much-needed dialogue to the writers of the region.

Hetal Patel's book on the author, A writer at Work in Fiji (2014, 2021) reveals that the trajectory of the writer's writing is determined by the different phases of engagement in his society.